The Big Change in Mangement at the US Air Force

USAF C-130Es (Photo by aviatorr727)

In a corporate setting, it's a big deal when, say, a CEO who came up through the ranks in the marketing department is replaced by someone who specialized in finance. The path of specialization that an executive follows leaves an indelible imprint on his or her outlook, and so it naturally has a clear impact on their managerial priorities upon moving in to the corner office.

The United States Air Force is no different.  For anyone who missed it, there was a very astute Op-Ed piece in yesterday's New York Times written by Max Boot, calling attention to last week's appointment of General Norton A. Schwartz as the new Air Force chief of staff. Boot notes that since the 1980s, most of Schwartz's predecessors as chief of staff had previously flown fighter jets, and — much like CEOs who'd previously specialized in marketing, or finance, or sales, or whatever — "senior officers tend to favor the platforms they operated as junior officers."

But Schwartz was never a fighter jock.  Instead, he flew C-130s, a lumbering, four-engined, propeller-driven, freighter aircraft. And thus Boot writes:

The new chief comes from an occupation — transportation — that is as unglamorous as military jobs get. But its importance cannot be overstated. Some of the most valuable assets in the armed forces are cargo planes and aerial refueling aircraft. We have about 2,000 of them, far more than any other country, but most are getting old (the original model of the C-130 was introduced in 1956), and the Air Force has struggled to replace them.

Special Operations aviation is more glamorous, yet it has also not been one of the most esteemed specialties within the Air Force. Aside from the AC-130 gunship (a transport plane with cannons), most of the other Special Operations aircraft don’t blow up targets but spy on them and transport commandos to them. Most Special Operations flyers do not get the prestige of being “trigger pullers.”

With an officer whose background is in transportation and special operations chosen to head the entire Air Force, a cultural revolution is well under way. Fighter planes and their pilots will not loom as large in the future as they have in the recent past.

Some years down the road lies an even more radical transition. The day will surely come when the Air Force chief of staff won’t be a pilot at all. The service now operates in outer space and in cyberspace. Experts in those areas are rising through the ranks. But it will probably take many years, and another wrenching transition, before a non-pilot rises to the top.

Telstar Logistics knows it's become a cliche for political bloggers to say "read the whole thing." But if you're at all curious about how the American military is gradually (and belatedly) adapting to the challenges of asymmetrical warfare and low-intensity conflict... seriously, read the whole thing.

LINK:
The Heir Up There (New York Times Op-Ed by Max Boot, 16 June, 2008)

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Comments

[Ran Barton]

I don't know if Boot was edited poorly, or if the mistake was his alone, but this piece describes the F-35 as designed for air-t-air- combat when it is, in fact, much more of an attack jet. Not that such an error makes the other things he says wrong, but it makes me wonder about his familiarity with the topic. McGraw Hill's Ares blog, as well as Flight's DEW Line, both offer very good coverage of Gates's decapitation of the USAF and its implications.

[striatic]

i'd say that even the F-22 can't really be considered a pure fighter. it's going to be replacing the rather inaccurately designated F-117, after all.

i wonder how much planning has gone into monstrously large, high altitude, fuel efficient UAV bomb trucks.